


Stepping Stone

by onceuponachildhood



Series: Heroic Hearts - the Senna Shepard story [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Blood, Child Death Mention, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-16 02:13:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10561690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onceuponachildhood/pseuds/onceuponachildhood
Summary: Senna Shepard reflects, after Mindoir.





	

There was blood underneath her fingernails. Senna looked down at it, dazed. The ship’s doctor moved with a practised, disinterested air when he applied medi-gel to Senna’s wounds and set her still-healing joint with a proper sling. He’d asked her all manner of questions - basic questions, like age and height, but also questions that made her feel cracked open, like how many siblings she’d  _ had _ or when was the last time she’d eaten. Now he bustled about the med bay, patching up soldiers who had wounds more minor than she. She’d been triaged, sitting silently holding gauze to her sluggishly-bleeding shoulder while she watched the medics move from injured, groaning soldier to injured, groaning soldier.

“Hey, kid.” Senna looked up. The soldier in the bed next to her chair was awake now. He’d taken enough damage that they’d carried him in, alive and clinging to consciousness with stubborn hope. He’d been treated before her and was now watching her watch the proceedings. “How’s the shoulder?”

She caught the shrug before she could follow the motion through, and instead croaked out a quiet “S’fine.” She swallowed, her throat feeling about as dry as they soil had during a drought. “Hurts less than a broken arm.”

The soldier snorted. “No kidding? Most people I know would much rather a clean break than a bullet to a delicate joint.” Why was he talking to her? What interest could a bruised, bleeding, quiet sixteen-year-old offer?

“It’s not my dominant hand,” she explained. “I can still write and use my biotics.”

“And shoot?” the soldier asked, tone gone soft and serious in a way that reminded Senna fiercely of her father. Her father, who was  _ gone _ \- she looked up from where her eyes had gone back to her nails, thoughts of which sibling’s blood it was caked there evaporated. At her glare, he shrugged. “You have that air about you, kid.”

“‘What ‘air about me’ are you talking about?”

He shrugged again, and winced, when the motion tugged at the tender edges of his wounds. “You gonna take all this-” he gestured carefully around them “-lying down? Let them adopt you out and go life a normal, quiet life?”

The idea was so absurd, so ridiculous. It was exactly what they were going to do with a broken kid from a tiny farming colony. The thought hadn’t even crossed Senna’s mind, and yet she already knew there was no way she’d want that life. Not anymore. She thought of kind eyes and a man willing to holster his gun to talk to her. She thought of brusque effectiveness in the face of mingling numbness and panic. She thought of a man in enough pain to be out for hours, forcing himself awake to talk to a traumatized kid.  _ I could do that _ , she thought. And she wanted it, suddenly, wanted for all this death and pain and heartbreak to mean something. “No,” she replied, more firmly than she’d spoken before. “No, I don’t think I will.”

“Atta girl,” he said. His eyelids drooped. “You gonna be alright if I conk out on you?”

She barked a laugh, glad there was something other than heart-crushing loneliness and panic to feel. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

* * *

“I don’t want a new family.”

The very nice, very official-looking Alliance representative stopped drumming his stylus on his datapad. “I’m sorry?”

Senna sat up a little straighter, folding her hands together as best she could without jostling her shoulder. “I’m sixteen. I had a family for sixteen years.” Her voice cracked a little on the word had, but she soldiered on. “I can stay in a group home or an orphanage for two years. It won’t be long before I’ll be eighteen, and a legal adult.”

“And what will you do then?” he asked, raising one too-neat brow at her. 

  
Senna smiled, though it felt fragile on her face. “Help protect people like me,”she answered. “Join the Alliance.”


End file.
